Cameron's Road to Brexit

Ivan Rogers lectures at Oxford, lots of interesting bits:

“The political effect of the decision of May 2004 to allow free movement of people into the UK from those [Eastern European] states without the seven year transitional period for which their Accession Treaties provided, of which all the other major western Member States took advantage, was even more critical. … The official internal forecasts we saw of the potential numbers of arrivals were, as one looks back, just laughably low. ...
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"Cameron's own crucial decision to take the Tories out of the European People's Party (EPP) Group, and to set up a new Group, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) enthused his parliamentary party. It helped win him the party leadership. He did it because, ultimately, he did not subscribe to the core political goals of the EPP for the EU. But it undoubtedly lessened the Conservatives' influence inside the belly of the beast, in which the backroom deals and manoeuvres of the three "mainstream" Grand Coalition parties largely dictated key appointments and institutional positions on key policy issues. ...
"the mutual misreadings of interests and incentives which we saw in the renegotiation, and we are seeing in even starker form now, stem from the absence of systematic informal political level contacts which build understanding. Not many Tories now intuitively understand Christian Democrats in the way they did 20 years ago. The same is true in reverse."